Consumer Innovation

To address their disappointing innovation results, many management teams advocate a strategy of launching Fewer, Bigger, Better products. While this is a sound approach, it has proven difficult to execute. Success requires the organizational resolve, discipline and confidence to launch fewer projects and still meet top-line innovation goals.

Keeping up with every new buzz and innovation is undoubtedly whiplash-inducing. But look away and you’ll be left behind. Are you going to be a mere spectator or will you drive innovation in your company?

Scientific breakthroughs are often reported as being innovation. I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to definitions, so if science produces inventions, they only become innovation if they are implemented and add value.

American Girl doll has been a leader in customer engagement well before the concept became a dinner conversation in the marketing innovation circles. With the raise of the experiential trend, American Girl yet again leaped ahead of it’s competitive set..

The network economy, in which nearly everything is available to nearly everyone, imposes a new requirement on leaders.
This new requirement is at the heart of leadership. It has to do with change, agility, problem-solving ability, the awareness needed to be able to adapt to an increasing complexity

Here's a nice example of the Attribute Dependency Technique, one of five in the innovation method called Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). It's a great tool to make products and services that are "smart." They adjust and learn, then adapt their performance to suit the needs of the user.

When people talk of innovation they often bring up the requirement for blue sky thinking. This conjures up a picture in the mind where there is total freedom and no restrictions. It implies that parameters are barriers to creative thinking. We don't buy this and we would go even further and say that innovating without boundaries only results in idea chaos.

The late 70′s must have been a crazy time. Beyond just Jobs and Woz and Gates and Allen, there was Osborne and Bricklin and Peddle and Bushnell. They must have known they were at a tipping point but just couldn’t quite sense the enormity of change that was about to take place. What emerged of course was the era of personal computing.